Let me add a few words about Joe Lieberman, who died on Wednesday. My memories of Joe Lieberman go back a long time. He was two years ahead of me at Yale Law School, and I remember him laughing and chatting with other law students in the halls. It was no secret that he had political ambitions.
His class of 1967 included not just one but two future U.S. senators who were also presidential candidates, Lieberman and Paul Tsongas, as well as the gifted political commentator Jeff Greenfield, who has tweeted both a generous remembrance and a hilarious story of their law school years that, a commenter pointed out, prompted an insertion into the Congressional Record by Cambridge congressman Tip O’Neill. Also present in New Haven with me in that academic year of 1966-67 was George W. Bush, then a junior at Yale College.
Greenfield’s tweet provides a good summary of Joe’s political career: “He led the life he was destined to lead–a life in the arena…and for all the rough and tumble of politics, for all the serious disputes and conflicts, he never lost his civility and good nature.” To which I would add that running through his political life was a large dose of ambition that prompted him to defy the political odds and, usually, to win.
The first evidence is that he wrote a thesis at Yale College on John M. Bailey, who was Connecticut Democratic state chairman from 1946 until his death in 1975 and who was also Democratic National Committee chairman from 1961 to 1968. Bailey owed the latter position to his early endorsement, and that of his ally Connecticut Gov. Abraham Ribicoff, of John Kennedy for president. Lieberman’s thesis was expanded and published as The Power Broker in 1966. (This was before Robert Caro’s prizewinning biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.)
Naturally, I read Lieberman’s book, which I remember as an admiring but not uncritical political biography, which goes into considerable detail about how Bailey made his living lobbying the pre-redistricting-cases Republican legislature. My own view was that politicians prefer books about themselves to be admiring and definitely not “not critical,” and I thought that in writing and publishing the book, Lieberman was risking offending a man with immense power over any Democrat’s political career in Connecticut.
But if that wasn’t risky, Lieberman’s next move was. In 1970, he ran as a reform Democrat in the primary against New Haven state Sen. Ed Marcus, a 12-year incumbent who was Senate majority leader, and Lieberman won. University towns in those days weren’t the left-wing bastions they later became, and New Haven then was more town than gown — more of an ethnic than a university town, heavily Italian but also with large numbers of Irish and Jewish voters as well. Marcus was a Yale and Yale Law graduate, with a successful law practice, and a political insider who was later Democratic state chairman and who lived until 2022. Running against Ed Marcus took nerve. Beating him took skill.
Lieberman’s next move was unsuccessful, running for Congress in the New Haven-centered 3rd Congressional District on the retirement of 22-year incumbent Robert Giaimo in 1980. In the year of the surprise Reagan victory, Lieberman lost to Republican Lawrence di Nardis, who lost the seat to Democrat Bruce Morrison in 1982 and lived until 2018. In that more Democratic year of 1982, Lieberman was elected to a four-year term as Connecticut attorney general, and he was reelected in 1986.
That left him in a position to hold on to that job while challenging Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker in 1988. But that race took daring too. Weicker had been elected in a three-way race in 1970 and was reelected by wide margins in 1976 and 1982. Republicans were then not as unpopular in Connecticut as they are today, and Weicker’s liberal voting record and opposition to Richard Nixon on Watergate helped him win easily. But it also antagonized some conservatives, and Lieberman, taking moderate stands on some issues, was endorsed by William F. Buckley, whom he had come to know when he was editor of the Yale Daily News. He won by a 50%-49% margin. Weicker was elected governor in 1990, imposed on Connecticut its first state income tax and didn’t seek a second term, and died in June 2023.
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Lieberman’s willingness to take political risks was apparent in his criticism of President Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and also in Lieberman’s steadfast support for the Iraq War. That carried some risk but also may have helped him become Al Gore’s candidate for vice president in 2000. He is now the third man in history (Allen Thurman in 1888 and Tim Kaine in 2016 were the others) to have been the vice presidential nominee on a ticket that won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. In 2006, he lost the Democratic primary for Senate to Ned Lamont but as an independent won the general election by a 50% to 40% margin, and served six more years in the Senate — and supported his friend and ally on foreign policy John McCain in 2008.
Joe Lieberman is being remembered, rightly, as a man who in defeat as well as victory remained good humored and serene, an example of the comity so rare today. Those qualities are even more remarkable in light of his ambition and aggressiveness in taking political risks.